Back to Billingham

by Graham Soult ·
Published November 17, 2010
· Updated November 10, 2016

Billingham town centre (16 Nov 2010)

Regular readers of this blog will be pleased to hear that I went back to Billingham yesterday, following my earlier underwhelming visit, back in June. The homogeneity and datedness of Billingham town centre’s design mean that it’s never going to win an award for the quality of its urban spaces, but visiting on a sunny afternoon – rather than a drizzly evening – certainly helped.

Billingham town centre (16 Nov 2010)

Boyes’ colourful (if rather dated) Christmas display – complete with animated Santa – was also having a very good stab at brightening up the dreary tunnel area at the side of its store. I suspect, however, that it would be possible to dig out a 1970s photo of the same window and not be able to tell the difference.

Boyes' Christmas window, Billingham (16 Nov 2010)

You’ll recall that Billingham’s old Woolies site (store #820) was taken over by Ethel Austin, only for it too to collapse into administration not long afterwards. After my last visit, I reported – based on what I saw, and what I’d heard elsewhere – that Billingham’s Ethel Austin was not among the 90 stores bought back by former owner Elaine McPherson, and had therefore closed.

Former Woolworths (now Ethel Austin), Billingham (16 Nov 2010)

However, it looks like I was mistaken – visiting Billingham yesterday the store was distinctly open, with a poster in the window explaining its imminent conversion to McPherson’s new Life & Style format. If nothing else, it demonstrates the hazard of a town centre, like Billingham, where almost all the shops are shuttered at night – creating a dead streetscape, and making it hard to identify the open stores among the closed down ones.

As a reminder of the days when Billingham town centre was rather better frequented by the area’s shoppers, I was interested to come across a couple of old photos, from about 1964, on the excellent Picture Stockton website. Woolworths, with its familiar red signage, is clearly visible in the second of the two photographs, having opened on 19 November 1953, alongside the now-similarly-defunct names of Dewhurst butchers and the footwear retailer Freeman Hardy Willis. Interestingly, the image shows the Woolworths store occupying only three bays of the building, rather than the five that it occupied – it would seem – from at least the 1970s onwards.

No doubt there will be someone out there who’s able to remember the store being extended – your memories, as always, are most welcome.

3 Responses

[…] One store in the latter category is Billingham’s (former) Ethel Austin. The town had the sheer bad luck to have Ethel Austin move into its former Woolworths store, only to then see Ethel’s collapse into administration as well. Having got the photo I was after, I turned on my heel and retreated back to the bus stop – after all, there was little other reason for me, or anyone else, to want to stay around. [UPDATE, 17 November 2010: It seems that Billingham's Ethel Austin hasn't, in fact, closed down.] […]

[…] closed when I last passed by several months ago, while Blaydon and Billingham (the town’s former Woolworths site) have also now gone. This pattern is reflected nationally, where the 48 stores that existed at the […]

Woolworths… from the archives

CannyInsights.com on Instagram

About this blog

Soult's Retail View is a blog by me, Graham Soult, taking a wide-ranging look at the UK retail industry. I'm a retail consultant based in Gateshead - and the person behind CannyInsights.com and CannySites.com - so my posts often (but not always) have a North East flavour. [read more]

In the News

Subscribe

If you enjoy Soult's Retail View, why not consider a subscription to my monthly Soult's Retail Report, packed with much more information and insight on the most significant openings, closures and new developments across Britain’s retail centres? See the available packages here.